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Facebook has joined the fray with not just AR Goggles, but the Goggles are the phone and its quite cool.

When Vodafone gave me the glasses to review, my first reaction was, to be honest, pretty much, whatever. It reminded me of way back, maybe 2010 when I was presenting at a conference at Auckland University and Telecom announced the Bebo phone. I don’t know how many they actually sold, but I doubt there were more than a hundred.

Then in Barcelona 2014 Facebook launched a mobile of their own. It wasn’t spectacular and I thought they would give up at that point, realizing that whilst most people used Facebook, that didn’t mean that it was the number one communication tool in their lives or that they wanted FB getting too much private information about them, not that they hadn’t already been doing that with Google for most of their lives.

Through Facebook Goggles

Anyway, I took them to a SMCAKL event to try them out. Social Media Club Auckland now provides a live list of who is attending via their Facebook page.

Using the Goggles plugin I identified the people I want to meet up with from the list. I was also able to send them a notification that I was going to be there and was keen to have a chat.

Sure enough, just like the AR in Daniel Suarez‘s prophetic books Daemon and Freedom, I was able to see the names of the people I wanted to see, above them in the crowd, which was very cool. I was also able to see the names and profiles of virtually every person in the room.

Everyone wanted to try them on and it was a couple of hours after the event closed that Vodafone pushed me and a last few Facebook Goggle fans out of the door.

As to the smartphone functionality, it is pretty well featured. I am now one of those people who are constantly looking up into the corners of my eyes as though I have a nervous twitch and am waving my hands in the air like a New York Italian singing the praises of the veal at my favorite deli. Of course it won’t be long before you are doing that too.

Remember cash? Do you still carry any? In the last few years with eMoney it has almost become non existent. New Zealand was one of the first countries to adopt EFTPOS as a way to reduce the risks and costs around cash management many yeas ago.

With so many people buying everything from groceries to electronics online or on finance, cash has become almost a thing of the past and something Kiwi travellers now find quite novel when we travel overseas.

It has been very interesting for the Government to deal with because in many cases where goods are purchased from overseas, they miss the opportunity to charge GST or other duties when parcels come from overseas in the mail.

New forms of virtual money have appeared and companies like Google, Facebook and Zynga have started creating their own value systems and many new barter organisations have appeared, while the old vanguards such as Bartercard are growing in popularity.

The old system of cash jobs, the grey market is probably the main area still propping up physical currency at all because even money transferred via eWallets through intermediaries such as the Telcos is still auditable. Out of interest, New Zealand hasn’t minted 5 cent coins since 2004, 20 cent coins since 2008 and the number of bank notes produced has been in decline at a rate of over 10% p.a. since 2010 even though our population has grown dramatically with increased immigration.

It is expected that within another 20 years bank notes and coins will become collectors items and future generations will look at them as an interesting historic item and wonder why anyone ever bothered with them.